Most of us grew up on a poisonous diet of overpopulation propaganda.

Recall the college class in which we were assigned to read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which begins with the author mournfully intoning “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and ends by advocating the abandonment of entire continents to famine and death in order to “cut … out the cancer [of population growth]

Look up the speeches of former Vice President Al Gore, who warned of an “environmental holocaust without precedent”--a “black hole” in his words--that will engulf us if we do not stop having babies.

In this and a myriad of ways we have been force-fed--and most of us swallowed whole--the nasty theory that there were too many people, along with its even more terrible corollary that it is necessary to practice inhumanity in order to save humanity--or some worthy fraction thereof.

But what if overpopulation is, as economist Jacqueline Kasun has remarked, a false dogma?